The unbearable heaviness of thinking everything is good for Trump

[robosmith]

The unbearable heaviness of thinking everything is good for Trump

Quote

“I think it probably martyrs Trump even more,” says Michael LaRosa, a former spokesman for first lady Jill Biden.

“He’s running as the world’s biggest victim,” says Frank Luntz, a political consultant and Trump critic, “and Americans rally around victims.”

Democrats are always “looking for the dark lining in the silver cloud at all times,” especially with regards to Trump, says Dan Pfeiffer, former adviser to President Barack Obama and current podcast host, whose inbox and text messages filled up with this kind of anxious talk after the Trump verdict.

“It’s only natural that people would become catastrophizers about Trump,” Pfeiffer says. “But it’s actually not true that he hasn’t faced accountability. Every time he has been on the ballot since 2016, literally and figuratively, he has lost.”

Mythologizing Trump as some kind of invincible monster who can absorb all attacks and only become stronger — that might be the thing that helps Trump and his Republican allies, Pfeiffer says. “When we pretend like he can survive anything, it imbues him with strength and gives him political advantage with a lot of people,” he says. “But the reality is, how bad a criminal do you have to be to be one of the most politically connected and richest guys around, and still be convicted of 34 counts of falsifying business records? The truth is he’s kind of a clown.”

“If you actually think it’s good to be convicted of multiple felonies, you probably need to go outside and touch grass,” says Jesse Ferguson, a Democratic consultant and former spokesman for the Hillary Clinton presidential campaign. “He’s far more Darth Vader than Obi-Wan Kenobi. If you strike him down, he doesn’t become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.”

To be fair to the worriers, there is a playbook for turning something as obviously bad as a criminal conviction into a political advantage. It just usually happens in other countries.

“This is a unique situation for the United States,” says Kateryna Odarchenko, a political consultant who worked for onetime Ukrainian prime minister and political prisoner Yulia Tymoshenko. “But in other countries where political persecution really exists, candidates use their criminal cases against them to say, ‘You see, I effectively fought the system, and they came for me.’” Trump has a potential opportunity, Odarchenko says, to try to use the case against him to cast himself as a “classical hero” fighting against a “big evil.” And he’s going there. “I was just convicted in a RIGGED political Witch Hunt trial: I DID NOTHING WRONG!” screamed a recent fundraising plea. In at least one way, it’s working: The Trump campaign used anger over the verdict to raise a staggering $141 million in May. 

BULLSHIT is working for Trump. Until people WAKE UP, like they have for every DEMAGOGUE in the past.